


All The Ways I Hate You

by SpencerMalloy



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Happy Ending, Im learning the tagging system but im still scared, M/M, Mutual Pining, Nico di Angelo and Will Solace are Dorks, No Smut, Not Like That, PJO, Solangelo angst, solangelo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-03-02
Packaged: 2019-03-24 01:18:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13800333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpencerMalloy/pseuds/SpencerMalloy
Summary: Nico is a disaster gay who can't tell that Will likes him, so he resolves to hate him instead. Will, a functional bi, persists in his attempts to make friends with Nico so they can progress to something more.





	1. All The Ways I Hate You

**Author's Note:**

> I also posted this on Wattpad I have an account there, I didn't steal anything

Nico hated Will Solace. He knew absolutely nothing more about the guy than what he was like at school, but that didn't stop him from hating him with every fiber of his being.

Maybe it was the way Will walked, or the way he dressed or the way he was so undeniably nice to everyone he met. A ray of sunshine? Far fucking from it, but that didn't stop him from being a good person. He helped people pick up the books they'd dropped in the hallway or tell them if their mascara smudged. He told people when he genuinely enjoyed the charcoal drawings they'd worked on in art class, even if the artist thought it was gross and disproportioned. Will Solace stood up to bullies and complimented the stupidly bold fashion choices the kids at school made. Will Solace would smile at you in the hallway for no other reason than you looked like you were having a bad day. Nico would know.

They had had six classes together since freshman year and Nico loathed every minute he had to sit through them, Will Solace only feet away, sometimes inches away, being a good person despite wearing flipflops in Winter and being a good student through all of the lessons Nico couldn't bear to pay attention to.

And Will Solace would smile at him and he would smile at their mutual friends and he would smile when someone told a joke at their table at lunch, because, oh didn't he mention? They ate lunch together, too. There was no escape from the freckled mess that was Will Solace.

By the middle of Junior year, Nico couldn't take another day of what he'd dealt with since middle school, the glossy blue eyes that looked like the ocean could cut his heart out and the teeth that poked from the good-hearted grin, ready to tear open his throat. Maybe Will didn't mean any of this to affect Nico the way it did, but there was nothing either of them could do about it now.

"Why do you hate me, Nico?" He would ask occasionally, when they were paired together randomly for a group project or when all of their friends were absent from the lunch table for one reason or another. And Nico would narrow his eyes, spit a snarky comment his direction, pick up and move entirely, request a new group or none at all because that was how he liked things. Because that's how things went in the life of Nico di Angelo.

Because no matter how many boys Will Solace dated, no matter how many times Nico's heart swelled in his chest at the mere sight of him in the hallway, Nico would never be the person that Will wanted to come home to at night or to build a life with or be the first person on his mind in the morning. Will would never want to wake up on the same pillow as him, with their legs intertwined and the comforting shared body heat trapped under the comforter.

If Nico wasn't allowed to love Will Solace, he would hate him.


	2. A Pen, A Poem and Pretty Mr. Angst

Nico always had a pen on him. If Will could trust nothing else about the world, this one singular fact would never betray him. They had never really talked but one didn’t exactly need to talk to Nico di Angelo to know what he was about. There were three core traits of Nico:

• Nico di Angelo does not like you. This means he will not be talking to you and any attempts to engage him in conversation will be met with blatant and unfiltered hatred.  
• Nico di Angelo will never like you. No matter how many jokes you make or how nice you are to him, regardless of the nights spent awake studying his social media accounts to find similar interests (or to fake them) for a pleasant conversation. He will even deny your brownies. There is nothing you can do about this.  
• Nico di Angelo will always have a pen on his person.

There was always the slight technicality of getting him to let you use said pen, but Will was desperate and there was literally no way in hell that he was asking Leo. He loved Leo but there was just no way to ignore the obvious teeth indents and the possible slobber that would fall onto your hand if you used any of his writing utensils. Really, any of his things at all. Will had once used a hammer with gnaw marks on the plastic handle. Will had done that before and he was not sinking to that level again. Ever.

They were in studyhall and Nico was doing his best to avoid him, per usual. Will had wished a thousand or more times that Nico would open up to him, to talk to him, to at least acknowledge that he was more than a pesky piece of gum that was stuck to the bottom of his shoe, too hard to peel off and so old and squished that he barely noticed it anymore. He wanted to be close to Nico more than he’d ever wanted anything all his years of wanting, but that wasn’t happening anytime soon. He would settle for the borrowing of a pen.

Will always got struck by inspiration at the worst times possible. On the toilet, walking to school in -3 degrees, trying to take a calculus exam. But sometimes he was lucky. Sometimes he was blessed with that gentle muse who waited for him to have a spare second in which to jot something down, the muse that wanted him to be happy and for lyrics and rhymes to spill out of the pen tip with little to no turbulence. The gentle muse was also a vindictive bitch who chose the only day where none of his friends or even mild acquaintances except for Leo The Licker and Mr. Angst were around to lend him a pen. Oh, and Will never brought his own supplies. It wasn’t an arrogant thing, it was just a Will thing. It always had been and he had made it to junior year without correcting it, so this really was his fault. Maybe this was the gods punishing him for being a lazy slacker with no motivation and no real skills except writing bad haikus and couplets. Either way, if he didn’t get the poem out of his head this minute it was going to fester and rot and die in the field of stanzas he couldn’t save. And he really liked this one. Somehow he had figured out another unique but still completely accurate way to describe Nico’s eyes.

The teacher watching them today didn’t really care about how much they moved around the classroom so long as no one made noise. Hopefully Nico wouldn’t choose to cuss him out today.

His shoes squeaked against the linoleum and the teacher’s head snapped up. He smiled awkwardly and hoped she wouldn’t yell at him. There were possible verbal assaults coming from every angle today and it had him very much on edge.

“Hey,” he whispered, crouched by Nico’s desk, his fingers curled over the surface and his head barely peaking up over it. Nico rolled his eyes dramatically and Will suppressed a smile.

“What do you want?”

“Can I borrow a pen?”

“Go away, Freckles.”

Will whined and bit the inside of his cheek. Nico’s face was still stone cold, but he shifted. With Nico it was all about the tells he didn’t want you to see, not the ones he showed you—so maybe he’d be able to wear him down. “C’mon,” he said, dragging out the syllables. “I’ll give it right back, I promise.”

Nico tapped his foot, but only once. Will let the silence get to him (of course, silence never got to him, not that he could tell, but he knew Nico wouldn’t want to be so close to him for long. If he could just hold his ground for long enough…)

Nico dropped a ballpoint pen on his face. “Scram,” he ordered, shooing him away with a flick of his wrist. Will grinned.

“Thanks,” he whispered, rushing back to his seat, scribbling onto the paper before he even sat all the way down.’

He pushed all the thoughts of the traits and mannerisms that he loved about Nico to the side of his mind, focusing instead on the stanzas he’d composed in his head. He’d almost lost them, they were on the tip of his tongue. He squeezed his eyes shut and summoned them back.

Will spent the next ten, fifteen, twenty minutes composing a poem about Nico. He couldn’t name the rhyming pattern, but it reverberated in the walls of his brain with a sweet tone and filled his mind with a pleasant chill. The one he got when he thought of Nico. Being around Nico di Angelo was to open a window on a March night, where the darkness of the sky froze dew drops until the morning sun hit it. To let that chill into your life was to cool down everything else around it, and that’s what Will craved more than almost anything. Most people didn’t open their windows at midnight in March. Will made a habit of it.

When he was finished with the poem it was nearly eight stanzas long, filled with imagery about his brown irises and his cold hands. They had only touched hands once or twice, in the beginning, and Will was almost sure Nico took special care not to touch him anymore—but he remembered how it felt to have their fingers brush. When Nico walked into the building at 6 am his face was flushed, his nose bright red and the tips of his ears just as crimson. He wrote about that, too. Even with how long the poem was and all of the information he had packed into it, it still wasn’t enough to say how he felt all at once. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to achieve that, actually. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to try.

He folded the paper and almost stuck it in his pocket. Almost. And then he opened the back of the pen and rolled the poem around the cartridge of ink, closing it and stealing a look around the room. Hopefully Nico hadn’t seen. In a few days the pen would run out of ink and Nico would throw the pen away. The poem would be lost forever, but that was okay. There were a lot of things that Will did that Nico would never notice. Will just had to learn how to accept that, no matter how much it hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I thought I could finish this in two chapters but I was badly mistaken. I dunno, I guess that would make a nice angsty ending but I really don't want to leave it like that. I'll probably do about three more chapters of about the same length as this one, maybe longer. We'll see. I hope you guys liked it. :)


	3. The Reject in the Rain

The rain tapping on Nico’s window set the mood for a million things he would like to be doing: sketching, reading, daydreaming—but of course he was writing a social studies report on the life and disappearance of Theodosia Burr. He thought it was interesting, that’s why he chose it, but he came alive in the rain and being stuck indoors with the cool water only a few feet away from his desk was driving him up the walls. He let his head sink into his hands and groaned.

The social studies report wasn’t important, is what it came to. It wasn’t important and in five years he would long for rainy days spent outside sketching at the park he was still technically young enough to be allowed into, so that’s what he did. He wrapped his sketchbook in a plastic bag and crawled into the tube slide at the park, light shining through the rainbow plastic and casting the perfect atmosphere into it. He plugged in earbuds and worked for seventeen songs, the scratches of his pencil getting harder with the angry tempos and softer with melodic tunes. He didn’t even realize what he was making until the side of Will Solace’s head was staring back at him.

It was just his hair, his ear, the curve of his face and neck and the collar of the stupid orange shirt he always wore. It was just these things but they came together to ruin him, just like they did in real life. Nico would always be upset that he could draw Will’s ear better than he could draw his face looking straight ahead. It was a testament to stolen glances and the narrowing of eyes whenever Will tried to talk to him. 

The sketchbook and pencil seemed to buzz in his hand—and then it stopped. And the world was still saved for the ever faster falling raindrops hitting the plastic tube. The song switched and Neutral Milk Hotel was on. He hated himself for making a playlist with My Chemical Romance AND nmh. The emotional whiplash it caused was one for the record books, but it was appropriate. Will Solace also caused him whiplash for the record books. He dropped the pencil back into the bag and looked for an inking pen. There was none. He’d forgotten it in the rush to get here before the rain turned too much to stand walking in (and now that it was, he didn’t want to cross the street just to come back.)

He groaned and was about to flip the page and start something new, something that hopefully wouldn’t make him want to cry when he felt the weight behind his ear. It was always there, so a part of him he barely realized it anymore, but there was indeed a cheap office pen hiding just out of sight. He had inked with those pens for years, it wouldn’t be a tragedy to fall back into old habits now.

The freckles on Will’s face wrapped around it. In fact, they covered almost every inch of it (even though it took a while to notice most of them. Most of them had almost faded into his regular skin tone—but when he came back to school in September of Sophomore year he had a tan that rivaled a god’s and all of his freckles stood to attention, and now Nico could never forget where they were.) They were even on the tips of his ears. He couldn’t ever get them exactly right on paper, but he tried his best and it seemed like with every new drawing he came closer and closer to accuracy.

The Aeroplane Over The Sea played as he began his inking. It ended sometime before he finished, but he didn’t notice. The pen started to die around the time he was outlining the way the rumpled t-shirt fell against his collarbone and wrapped around his neck. He shook it, trying to get the last bit of ink to settle in the nib when he heard the rustling. Nico would always admit that he knew nothing about the world, this was just a fact—but he’d worked with enough stationary to know this was abnormal. 

This kind of pen had a back that came off for basic assembly, but he had never considered putting something in it. Wrapped around the cheap plastic ink cartridge was a piece of paper, obviously ripped from a notebook, with the fringes where it attached to the spiral carefully pulled off. He eyed it suspiciously before opening it.

Pieces of sunshine dance in his hair  
And His eyes hold enough sunrises for a lifetime together  
His eyes have no malice, they just reflect the weather  
Except his smile controls the clouds and all the shapes they take  
The first person I think of when I wake  
And I want to love him, but he just doesn’t care

This continued for seven more stanzas, each one more sweet and sadder than the last. When he came to the last line his face was wet and he couldn’t blame it on the rain for once. 

Who wrote this? Who was it for? How the hell did it get inside of his fucking pen? The questions ran through his head as fast as the next song on his playlist, something fast and raw and loud, completely conflicting with the tone of the poem. And then he remembered. The one person he had lent out a pen to, because he was the only person he would ever lend a pen out to, because he was the only person he could trust to return it. And probably some other reasons he didn’t like to think about. It was definitely in the handwriting he had spent hours dissecting after letting Will write the answers to a shared paper on a project in eighth grade before things got unbearable. He still had the paper pinned to a corkboard above his desk, his reason for keeping it being the 98% grade from a teacher who never gave out more than a 86%. That was a lie of course, but his parents didn’t care about that. 

His whole chest was collapsing in on him, suffocating him in repressed thoughts. Drowning him in a sea of possibilities to overwhelming to consider, too painful to be real. The walk back to his house was wet, but he couldn’t tell whether that was from tears or the rain. He hadn’t tied the plastic bag up, the edges of his sketchbook were getting   
soaked. He wasn’t thinking about that. He was thinking of the folded piece of paper he was clutching in the pocket of his hoodie. He was numb. He chalked it up to the cold. Nico di Angelo, ever the reject, ever in denial.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay I lied one more chapter


	4. All The Ways I've Loved You

Will didn’t know what to do when he got home that night or when he got to school the next morning. Putting the poem in the pen was the worst thing he could have done—what if Nico found it? There was no way to play it off as anything but what it was: A stupid, careless, utterly irrevocable declaration of his love. 

He had never told anyone he was in love with Nico di Angelo. Never. Not a single soul. If the first person to find out was Nico himself, well, that would be some kind of justice. He could get told off for the final time, maybe he would even punch him. It wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility, Nico was known to be a wild card and he’d fought people he liked more for less heinous crimes than the one Will had committed against him. This is what he thought about all through Biology, through Calculus, through lunch—all day up until studyhall. 

Everyone had been clued into Will’s mood all day, and the number of people who asked him if he was alright was surprising—but nowhere near as surprising as who asked next. Nico had switched desks and was seated in the one beside him, the one that was usually empty. Will checked his usual seat, three rows to the left and four rows back. Empty. Why the hell was he here?

“Excuse me?” Will asked. 

“I asked if you were alright,” Nico said. “If this school can’t count on you for hope that everything will be okay, I don’t know who’s left.”

He was sweating just from making eye contact with Nico without staring straight into a scowl, his hands were so numb that the pencil he’d mooched off of Piper the period before slipped onto the desk. He still managed to roll his eyes.

Seeing that was a first for Nico. Suddenly every interaction that he’d ever had with Will Solace came rushing back and he realized he’d never seen him unhappy. Never. Not to mention angry. Snarky? Sarcastic? Eye roller? These words were not synonymous with Will Solace. What had changed from yesterday?

“Seriously, di Angelo,” Will said, “Everyone has bad days. I’ve tried to be nice to you—you obviously don’t fucking care—“

The teacher shot them a pointed glare when she heard Will cuss. He rolled his eyes at that, too, and lowered his voice when he continued. “So if you want to poke fun at someone, I heard that Charlie Beckendorf’s girlfriend just broke up with him; why not mess with him?”

Will couldn’t believe what he was saying, he barely registered the hitch in Nico’s breathing when the word left his mouth. He regretted it. He regretted the poem, too, but he regretted this more. Still, he couldn’t stop now. 

“What?” he asked. He could tell the sneer on his face was ugly. “You’ve been a dick to me since fifth grade. I’m done trying.” Every fraction of resentment Will held against Nico for never giving him a chance came rushing to the surface. He hated it. Maybe it was for the best. It would stop hurting if he and Nico never talked to each other again.

“I…” Nico’s voice was quiet, he was looking down at the sketchbook in his lap. His knuckles were white around the cover. “I understand.” He said.

Nico stood up silently and took a deep breath. It was only seconds but it felt like hours—Will had given him an out. There was no way they would ever talk to each other again if he left right now. That had been what he wanted for years now, a release from his addiction to Will Solace. 

Except he had never wanted that.

Will felt his expression soften involuntarily when Nico set his sketchbook on Will’s desk with the lightest touch he had ever seen. He turned and walked to the teacher’s desk without looking back. He heard Nico ask for a bathroom pass. He stomped everywhere but his footsteps were quiet as he left.

Leo was in the library making up a test, no one Will knew was there to witness what just happened. He could dump the sketchbook in the trash at the front of the class and be done with it forever. 

Will was impulsive, but he wasn’t an idiot. He opened the sketchbook to the first page and had to catch his breath.

Nico never let anyone see his drawings. Will had no idea why. They were all so beautiful—the first one was of his sister, Hazel. The next was a girl he had never seen before. She had Nico’s nose and was wearing a floppy hat. His mother, maybe? Will would have to ask. Some of the pages looked like they had gotten wet and then dried, but that didn’t take away from the clear beauty of Nico’s work.

There were portraits of their friends done on the following pages, and several figure studies. Still lifes of a cluttered desk and a strangely intricate inked and colored drawing of a corkboard. It was filled with sticky notes and push pins and had bandanas hanging off of the corners. Up near the left of the board was a paper with a 98% circled and…Will’s handwriting forged in small print. 

Scattered in the rest of the random drawings were strangely familiar drawings of the same person over and over again, the same side of a head, the same fluffy hair and broad shoulders showed only from the back, the same forehead. He was almost completely through the sketchbook when he finally saw the person’s whole face. 

It was him. 

In the drawing, he was shaded in charcoal, hunched over a desk and looking up through his eyelashes at something. In the corner of his page was the first stanza of the poem he slipped inside Nico’s pen yesterday.

Pieces of sunshine dance in his hair  
And His eyes hold enough sunrises for a lifetime together  
His eyes have no malice, they just reflect the weather  
Except his smile controls the clouds and all the shapes they take  
The first person I think of when I wake  
And I want to love him, but he just doesn’t care

On the following page, it was something similar, his head propped up in one hand while he laughed, adam’s apple jutting out in a way that made him touch his real one unconsciously. Scrawled in the bottom corner was the second stanza:

His laughter is like blowing bubbles  
Pop, pop, pop—  
All the way to my heartstrings  
Pull me up like Pinocchio because where he goes, I go  
The same with the next, a simple picture of him smiling, messy hair and a million more freckles than he ever knew he had.  
My sunshine boy who embodies more light than he means to  
With his smiles given out like  
End suicide pamphlets

The poem switched from organized to free verse to something else again. He didn’t have time yesterday to change it—he should have. On the next page he was sitting at a desk, arms folded on the top of it and his cheek resting against his forearm, sleeping.

Personality like a shared soda at a party  
Fizzing in my throat  
A sweet coat of syrup  
Everything that gets me high

The next drawing of Will is different, it’s done on a piece of black paper with white charcoal, taped into the sketchbook. He’s looking at something off the page, his arms wrapped around his torso.

I see him when he sits alone  
A prince upon a stoic throne  
An expression to mask the things he’s feeling  
I fall asleep to thoughts of him  
Controller of my every whim  
He doesn’t know he sends me reeling

Will’s face burns so bad, his ears and neck on fire along with his cheeks. He’s such a sap—of all the ones Nico could have seen, why did it have to be this one? When he turns the page, there’s more than just him displayed there. He’s sitting at a table, talking to a figure with no face but Leo’s hair. The back of Nico’s head sits in the corner of the page, the next lines overlapping his hair.

There’s a million things I want to tell him  
Things I think he needs to hear  
The coins I’ve tossed down wishing wells  
Wishing he were near  
The next picture is a bust of Nico sitting at a desk, head propped up by his hand, eyes squeezed shut.  
But he doesn’t love me  
And I can’t change this fact  
I think he thinks awful thoughts  
That my affection is an act.

It’s Nico sitting in the same position but from further away. His eyes looking over at Will, smiling down at his notebook as he scrawls something down. Nico’s own expression…he’s smiling, but it’s melancholic. Even his eyes are sad. Will doesn’t know how he did that with just a charcoal pencil. The lines are printed directly underneath their desks this time:

My sunshine boy with cloudy eyes  
A darling smile  
That was never mine

Will doesn’t even feel himself moving until he’s out of the door without a pass, the teacher shouting at him as he rushes to the bathroom. He splashes water on his face and looks at himself in the mirror. How could he say that to him? How could he fuck everything up just as things might have gone his way? Of course he did. He laughed a hollow laugh and wiped the tears forming at the corners of his eyes away. He shouldn’t have expected anything less—he was great at messing up his life.

He was sobbing into his clenched fists when he heard the stall unlock. The door pushes open and soft footsteps walk up behind him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he is, for what he said, for crying in the bathroom, for having to exist at that precise moment.

“So am I,” Nico said, sounding as destroyed as Will feels. He can’t bring himself to look.

He heard Nico lift himself onto the row of sinks. He could feel him watching him. “Did…You looked at it, right?”

Will removed his hands from over his raw eyes and breathed a shaky breath that raked his whole body. Nico’s expression…he’d never seen anyone look so exposed. His brown eyes still bore right into Will’s soul.

“I saw—I promise I’m better at poems than that—“

“I loved it.”

Will’s mouth opened and closed, once, twice, three times. He hated that poem. It’s just plain juvenile, now that it’s had time to marinate.

“Your drawings are beautiful,” Will said and Nico was suddenly even more on edge than he was before. He didn’t think that was possible.

“Thank you…”

“How long?” Will asked, his numb body practically limp.

Nico took a moment to answer, never breaking eye contact. “Third grade. I didn’t realize it was a crush until sixth, though,” he said. “You?”

Will laughed, leaning against the sinks. “Honestly? Sixth. But I didn’t even notice I liked you more than everyone else until eighth.”

Nico shook his head, “Oh my goodness. We really are useless, aren’t we?”

His hand rested on Nico’s knee, he didn’t dare to look away as he moved in front of him.

“I don’t think you’re useless,” Will said. Nico’s heart sped up ten percent as he reached out to hold Will’s face. He had to lean down for their foreheads to touch, and when they did he had to catch his breath. He could feel Will’s heartbeat in his jaw—it was just as fast.

“I’m in love with you,” Nico said, letting his eyes fall shut. He was ready to wake up any moment—he’d had this dream before. 

He heard Will suck in air, felt his chest expand from it against his own. Will was directly in between Nico’s knees, his arms had moved to wrap around his waist a while ago. He was ready to wake up now.

Instead he felt Will’s lips press against his own. They were only joined for a moment, neither of them could remember how to breathe. When they tried again Will gripped him tighter and Nico’s fingers slipped into blonde locks he’d been itching to touch for years. Neither of them had any intention of letting go.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fin. I hope you guys liked it!


End file.
